Facing hunger, framing food banks, imaging austerity

Abstract

This paper analyses the scopic regime established by images of UK food banks. Analysis of three popular images of 'Food Bank Britain' reveals the persistence of historical practices for visualizing hunger -namely, the dominance of faciality, infantilization of the hungry, and erasure of geographical context from visual frames. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this paper demonstrates how such images serve to 'frame' austerity -where framing describes the link between the bounding of the literal edges of an image and the epistemic, affective frames for understanding and feeling austerity that are mobilized. Rather than attempting to portray 'real' images of food banks, this scopic regime is instead marked by the production of ocular affects that structure the feelings of the viewer towards certain political ends. It is concluded that this framing of hunger denies the political life of food bank users, a process that in turn effaces the radical questions necessary to address the causes of hunger at a time of austerity.

A genealogy of the food bank: Historicising the rise of food charity in the UK

“…The names of individuals and organisations revealed by these searches were cross‐referenced against Companies House and the Charity Commission database. Notwithstanding the ways in which debates over food banking have become much more politicised in recent years (Wells & Caraher, 2014), our newspaper search revealed several tropes in the historical accounts of charitable food provision that chime with contemporary discourse (Strong, 2021), including the absence of the voices of recipients, categorisations of deservedness, and a certain self‐congratulatory tone concerning charitable donations. But we are less interested in these representational tropes per se than in what “conditions, limits and institutionalises [the] discursive formations” such accounts reveal (Reich & Turnbull, 2018, p. 3).…”

Love in the space–time of inequality: Attachment and detachment across unequal lives

“…This is evident in the operation of normative scripts that govern what are deemed to be correct or acceptable forms of attachment – where practices of love are produced through a social ontology of the body (Butler, 2009). Accordingly, ‘to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form’, where images, texts, discourses and performances differentiate the forms of love we can apprehend from those we cannot (Butler, 2009, p. 3; quoted in Strong, 2021a, p. 1338). As such, the scripting of what constitutes love is tied to the reproduction of structures of patriarchy, heteronormativity, class systems and citizenship regimes entailed in the governing of populations and guiding the conduct of individual bodies (Foucault, 2003).…”

“…But whilst these frames dominate academic and policy discussion, they are not the only way in which inequality must be understood. Indeed, the dominance of these renderings of inequality, in the present moment at least, reveals an important enmeshment of politics with statistical knowledge (Ramos Pinto, 2019)where numbers shape not only how we describe inequalities, but also the kinds of solutions we prescribe (Strong, 2021a).…”

For feminist geographies of austerity

“…For instance ‘the day-to-day existence of coping with welfare reform’ has been described as often leading to ‘fatigue, a gradual slow wearing out that comes with having to endure everyday hardship’, revealing how ‘weariness is an integral part of understanding austerity’s everyday affects on the body’ ( Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar, 2019 : 157). Working with entanglements of psychic and social dynamics, the sensation of being ‘squeezed’ ( Stenning, 2018 ) has been deployed to illustrate how austerity is simultaneously emotional and embodied, and experiences such as food poverty as literal ‘hunger pains’ ( Strong, 2021 ). And the process of researching austerity has been conceptualised as a type of physical labour, bodywork and form of care work ( Hall, 2017 ).…”